The argument in this article is just ridiculous. Handwringing about giving fans more information because they might not interpret it correctly? Breaking news: A lot of people are already plenty wrong with the current amount of information. They'll be wrong with less, they'll be wrong with more, they'll be wrong if the info level stays the same. This is therefore a null argument.
I think they are just using this as a way to advertise the NFL video product (which seems like it is not selling very well). When you tell a bunch of armchair football experts "This is for experts only. You may not be able to handle it.", many people immediately look to prove them wrong.
This article reminds me of the time I went car shopping and wanted to test drive a 6 cylinder version of a car after driving the 4 cylinder. The salesman gave me this really phony pitch saying "I have to warn you, many people can't handle a car this fast. But once you experience the power of the 6 cylinder engine, there's no going back!". In reality, I didn't see a huge difference between the two models (I didn't buy either one), but I can see how this technique makes it easier for him to sell the more expensive car.
I don't think this is the case necessarily. People have been asking for all-22 footage for a long time and this is the answer they've always given before this season. The fact that they continue to parrot this line makes me believe that's how most nfl executives feel about it
> It's advertorial, marketing disguised as journalism.
It's barely even disguised. If it were published by a news organization[1], or really just "someone else", then you would be right.
This is an article on NFL.com about an NFL product. It's straight up advertising. Publishing an "article" to say "this seems 'risky'; why would we even offer this product to you, our fevered fans" is about the thinnest disguise an ad could have.
I'd probably be less offended if I didn't see this argument so often. As Evbn points out, it's not the first time I've heard it. I find the premise deeply insulting.
Clearly there are varying gradations of being wrong and just because they're wrong doesn't mean they're as completely wrong, or as frequently wrong; the article only claims that they will be more wrong. See the http://lesswrong.com/lw/mm/the_fallacy_of_gray/.
It's not always easy to judge. If a local weather man says 30% chance of rain in DC, does that account mean rain on in some part of DC, 30% of DC will get rain, the average chance of rain for the area is 30% with some parts of it having above 30% and others lower, or some combination of all 3.
This is a good point. What's ironic is that American Football playbooks, formations, and strategies are almost ludicrously complex. And the number of people that think athletes are "stupid" is amusingly large. A large number of the latter are ignorant of the former, including a large chunk of "intellectuals" contributing to closed access journals. people are intelligent in various ways, 3D spatial intelligence for example does not translate into wirting per-se. Nor does it follow that because you are book-smart you will have a clue about analyzing game film.
This is very exciting, as there's a lot of strategy to American football that isn't plainly visible when the camera just follows the ball as it does on television. It's not going to showcase technique very well, but it'll go a long way towards explaining e.g. why some wide receivers are always open, why some players always seem to be in the right position to interrupt a pass, etc. I'd actually find it very interesting to see something like a Coursera course using film from this to explain different plays, packages, etc.
However, I'm not sure it's of wide interest to HN. As far as I can tell, I'm the only one here who likes NFL football.
> However, I'm not sure it's of wide interest to HN. As far as I can tell, I'm the only one here who likes NFL football.
You'd probably be surprised. I know I was surprised when I got to college and found more football fans amongst my engineer friends than my humanities friends.
It turns out the game is very complex and deep and discussing strategy can be quite interesting.
I wasn't a football fan when I arrived in college, but I was when I left.
I think the biggest difference between "normal" football fans and the football enthusiasts like me and the ones I met in my engineering classes boils down to what reasons you enjoy watching the game and, perhaps with overlap between the groups, what level you're paying attention to the actual plays being called and run.
Most people love football because they identify with a team, and almost exclusively watch games involving their team, and aren't really paying too much attention to the strategy. They know the rules and the different types of plays, but they are really there for the tribal passion that a rough contact sport like football tends to evoke.
On the flip side, I don't actively seek to watch football games for a single team; if I happen to go somewhere that's playing a football game on TV, I love watching it, and don't care who wins, because I just enjoy the strategic and tactical decisions being made on and off the field. Watching a play unfold and seeing the snap decisions being made and the reactions from both teams to the changing field is truly fascinating.
I do still follow the results of my old hometown team, the Cincinnati Bengals, but more out of humorous pity at how terrible they are year after year than out of any identification with them or desire to see them win.
But hey, maybe I'm just ascribing what I want to see from the data, and maybe my opinion of "normal" people is skewed from growing up in Ohio compared to somewhere else in the country.
I have enjoyed Football for a while -- good sport, fun to watch.
I REALLY got into Football a few years back when I hopped on the fantasy football bandwagon -- a lot of strategy (projections, history, weekly match up, e.g., do I start Tom Brady against Baltimore or RG3 against StL?), statistics, a random element (injuries, x-factor players breaking out, coaches benching people), etc. There is quite a bit of crossover between that and many other strategy games.
You should try Fantasy Baseball. The stats go so much deeper and there is so much more data to process than with football. The strategy involved for informed players can be quite incredible.
I'm always tempted to try it but Fantasy Baseball always seems like too much of a full time job to me. Do you set your lineups on a weekly basis or is it something that requires daily attention?
Well there are leagues that do both. I prefer daily for the precise reason that it requires my daily attention. I tend to forget about things that only need be dealt with once a week (Ie fantasy football) and often end up with abandoned teams. As such the daily format of baseball works better for me as I am paying attention to it every day.
I understand your concern about the full time job thing, but honestly the point of it all is to have fun. Also don't we always say on here that when you're doing something you love, it doesn't feel like work?
Daily attention. My friend has done it for several years, and often his dedication is a good enough for why he wins.
But I think it's worse than daily attention. The MLB isn't like the NFL in that its schedule is spread out all over the place. It has to be constantly on your mind to make sure you have the right relief pitchers started, etc.
I'm very happy to be mistaken. I was a casual fan in college, but the worm turned for me when I started hanging out with my brother in law who plays at Ball State. Hearing someone accurately predict what's going to happen before the ball is snapped, and then explain why (e.g. "they ran it up the gut because the linebacker had his weight back on his heels") really opened my eyes to the depth. If there's any HN football fans out here in Denver who'd like to get together one weekend to watch a game, I'd love to meet up!
> Hearing someone accurately predict what's going to happen before the ball is snapped, and then explain why (e.g. "they ran it up the gut because the linebacker had his weight back on his heels") really opened my eyes to the depth
I dunno, it feels like having every play predicted might get annoying. :)
But yes, I too was enamored by the depth and strategy that I started picking up using friend's extra tickets and hanging out on "tightwad hill", which is a place above the stadium where you can watch free Cal games.
Additionally, why can't we play Dungeons and Dragons and watch football? I heavily enjoy both. Not to mention Fantasy Football, which is a strategy nerds dream, that they can actually play with their non-nerdy friends. Come to think of it, why don't we have HN Fantasy Football leagues?
Some friends of mine and I talked about doing one where we wrote bots to manage our teams instead of managing them manually. Then that turned into "We should build a platform that supports that for leagues..." and got lost on beer napkins or something. I still think it'd be fun.
It would be loads of fun. Unfortunately, I think the primary reason why there aren't a lot of cool ideas like this already implemented is for legal reasons. From what I've heard, starting your own fantasy league by using NFL data is just pretty much impossible.
I'm also at the intersection of HN and fantasy football, which led me to create http://app.pickemfirst.com
a browser extension to manage your fantasy teams
Hit the nail on the head for me. I don't really give a damn about football, but I found the article interesting, came here to blow smoke about it, found jerf had beaten me to it.
My wife and I love the show "The League," but I wouldn't be able to watch it without her there to explain the football references, which are plentiful. I find myself idly wondering what it would take to write a fantasy football site and what the benefits could be.
I inferred the existence of high quality geeks who care a lot about football from my geologist friend, who told me a few years ago that every year somebody releases a modified ROM of NES Tecmo Superbowl with updates for the current season.
I assume we are not talking Thoroughbred horses here?
I do not want to risk another "oh HN is becoming Reddit" discussion, but could we focus on the reasons why one of the worlds largest sports organisations does not want its fans to see a wideshot of a pitch and how on earth they think wifi enabled phones, 3D cameras and 10billion channels will do to their reasoning in 5 years?
I grew up a Lions fan, but man, that HBO show Hard Knocks got me hooked on your team. Now I find myself wanting to watch Dolphins' games and hoping Joe Philbin gets it together.
This is surprising to me. Hard Knocks has been a good series, but this year's offering was so much worse than any other year that I wonder if it won't get canceled outright (it doesn't help that teams aren't exactly lining up to participate).
I found Joe Philbin to be insufferably boring. Maybe it's just the contrast with Rex Ryan last year.
At any rate. I'm glad there are so many football fans in the HN ranks.
> However, I'm not sure it's of wide interest to HN. As far as I can tell, I'm the only one here who likes NFL football.
I'm sure there are plenty of HN readers who are football fans, you just don't see many sports stories because they're generally considered off-topic. From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html :
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. ... If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
This all-22 discussion is probably on-topic for HN because it has more to do with the pros and cons of exerting control over exactly how people consume your product than with the specifics of the sport.
The NFL's policies on footage are an interesting example of information control. People in the audience can clearly see all the players on the field, but people watching at home are not allowed to. And even though the NFL has put tons of money into excellent cameras and awesome post-processing effects, they still hadn't released the most informative camera views!
It's not just live TV though. They take footage from a lot of angles during the game, and make it available to other networks for post-game analysis, etc. But they haven't made the All-22 footage available at all. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3275698
I was commenting specifically on the 3 hour "live game experience" shown on CBS, FOX, etc. I'm not sure most of the market wants the type of analysis that would be required to give coverage to the 22-Man views. They just want to watch the game, not think about strategy.
However, there are certainly people (myself included), who would gladly pay the small fee here to better understand the strategy behind the game.
Seconded. If you want to get started on something that you may have always wondered about, here is some in depth analysis of the peyton manning offense in indy:
You're not alone but the startup community definitely has less than average number of people interested in football and sports in general. I don't have data on this, it's the feeling I get as someone doing a startup in sports and talking to other entrepreneurs in the bay area.
Same here. I hear the announcers throw around a bunch of different terms describing formations or strategies. Now, we will actually be able to see them in action as a whole.
I do biomechanical research and train baseball pitchers. I have a big blog post coming up about machine learning using PITCHf/x data to see if you can predict injuries with publicly available data from MLBAM (hint: future is promising!).
My company is Driveline Baseball / Driveline Biomechanics Research. We also develop wearable computing technology to capture kinematics of the movie arm (you know this as "pitching mechanics").
It's incredible that they're offering this tape--especially from a computer vision perspective. With enough data, one could conceivably write a program that predicts a team's next play based on the players' pre-snap formation and the previous plays.
Actually, this kind of thing has been around for a long time.
Football Outsiders does game charting and "advanced NFL statistics". People have published papers on using artificial neural networks to predict play calling, success rates, even injuries and stuff like that.
But this does give us the ability to enrich the data quite a bit. When you watch the live film you really can't see who blew a coverage where or why the safety didn't get to the running back in time to make a tackle. I think if you just watch the TV angles then you might not be convinced that pump fakes actually do anything to confuse the defense.
There's a lot to be gained here by statisticians and casual fans alike but it's hard to see that when only 1/3 of the action is visible at any given time.
Football Outsiders abuses the use of statistics and engages in data snooping (the "study" on running backs comes to mind) to make their points. They're far, far behind organizations and people who have lent credence to sports analytics, like Baseball Prospectus, Tom Tango, Pete Palmer, Bill James, etc.
I agree with you (although your comment sounds almost ranting) but you kinda have to mention them in any conversation about using data to understand football... even if it's not used properly.
I actually dont think you could do that because teams need to randomize amongst plays or else defenses would crush them. That is one of the coolest (in my opinion) parts about football is the amount of strategic depth that goes into it. For a quick reference: http://www.advancednflstats.com/2008/06/game-theory-and-runp...
I never understood the fear of fans wrongly criticizing teams/players/coaches based on the All-22 tape. All other sports make their own equivalent of it available allowing fans to see every mistake made by every player. As far as I know it hasn't resulted in any worse sportsmanship. Football in particular has always had Monday morning quarterbacks and always will. The media has always had access to the All-22 tape and do break down the best and worst plays every week. I'm glad they're finally opening this up but does anyone know what they were so scared of before?
This does open up a huge opportunity for third party analysis, most obviously for sports betting and fantasy football tips. With a much smaller sample size of games and plays football will never become as predictable as baseball but it will be exciting to see what the general public will do with this.
Also for any high school defensive backs who previously had no way to study how the pros play their position, this is huge!
I didn't know that, I'm not into american football or baseball, but I like the NBA a lot.
TNT Overtime is probably not available in my country (Uruguay), and most live streams are still mostly unwatchable here, but I'd really like to have the option some day :) .
I really like living in the age when cable tv is being replaced by Netflix and equivalent internet broadcasts :) . Sadly my hope that I could enjoy the same stuff being broadcast in the US, Europe and Japan still hasn't come to pass (they've managed to region-encode the Internet :P and proxies are not a long-term answer)
And the first consequence of opening that Pandora's Box would be even more ammunition (not that any more is needed) for fans/writers/anyone with a passing interest in NFL to point out how awful the replacement refs are
This announcement dates from June, so I believe the footage is already available. So far I haven't heard anyone cite the All-22 footage for anything other than Grantland.com articles.
"And therein lies the problem with All-22 tape becoming available to the general public, particularly when it comes to passing plays. Someone will be open and many fans will assume that the quarterback did not make the right read or was locked onto another receiver. Yet in reality there is a progression on every pass play -- based on the coverage -- that a quarterback must rely on to determine who gets the ball. What might appear to be open on the All-22 might not be on the progression."
Hey guy posting on NFL.com, thanks for assuming the entire fanbase consists of complete idiots!
Ask any legitimate football fan if they understand the concept of QB progressions and they'll ask you if you understand how to recursively parse a binary tree in-order (assuming of course you're a programmer).
ESPN/NFL films has been feeding this to us for years using their access to All-22 so I find it hard to believe that when us plebs get access to it we'll suddenly forget that a QB can miss a receiver because he was under pressure from the pass rush or fooled by some defensive scheme.
Literally this past week when Peyton Manning and the Broncos played the Atlanta Falcons on Monday Night, ESPN/Sportscenter kept repeatedly showing us how Peyton Manning was fooled at the beginning by the Falcon's coverage schemes with... All-22 footage. I'm sure there will be fools who will react the way this author describes, but a lot of fans are way more hardcore and want access to All-22 to improve their understanding of the game.
"Hey guy posting on NFL.com, thanks for assuming the entire fanbase consists of complete idiots!"
That's Michael Lombardi. Perhaps you are not giving him enough credit as a former NFL executive? He is more than just "some guy".
"ESPN/NFL films has been feeding this to us for years using their access to All-22"
That is a partially correct statement. They would highlight specific plays and break them down for us (Ron Jaworski is great at this). However, for the first time the fans can get these raw tapes of footage and break it down themselves. With no help from the pros.
My point isn't that he isn't an expert on the NFL. But I would say he does not know much if he thinks giving people more information will make people jump to conclusions they've already made beforehand. Giving people this information is not any more detrimental than broadcasting the game on a TV. You will always have people shouting, "what an idiot" when a QB misses a receiver, adding this will at least give them additional information.
I don't think the 'average fan' is ever breaking anything down on their own. It just requires too much dedication and time to build the knowledge.
But the key is that this isn't being released to just the average fans.
What we're more likely to see, is a cottage industry of superfans springing up to 'go-Jaworski' on more plays, more games, etc. And that content will be consumed by the average fan.
I've thought for a while now that the NFL network - their TV presence, the website - is the future of how sports will be. It's an incredibly good product if you're a football fan (as I am - go Niners).
The TV channel is well done for the fan, a mix of informality with information - bunch of faces that make us nostalgic due to their past achievements combined with solid anchors who have personality but don't try to outshine the hall-of-famers who know their stuff.
The website is very well done, interactive, some fun game dynamics. Their apps are good enough - much room for growth but they're getting better.
The all-22 game tape is a nice step forward here.
I think people who want to study the future of pro-sports media in the evolving media marketplace could do a lot worse than watching what the NFL is doing.
NFL Redzone is the greatest innovation in sports in the last 20 years, if not ever. I didn't watch a single game on FOX or CBS last season and I won't this year either. I honestly can't believe that the NFL doesn't charge a big subscription fee for it.
That is not All-22 footage; it's just standard HDTV footage.
All-22 footage is from "overhead" (at least as high as safely possible in a stadium) and shows about 2/3 of the field at all times. The All-22 footage does not have the onscreen extras such as down and distance nor the generated 1st down yellow line.
What is so spectacular here? His ability to get down the field or his positioning and ability to not get caught up at the line?? Surely the fact that a 275 lb. lineman with velocity pancaked a 185 lb defensive back is not notable. :)
Condescending, elitist BS. OMG, the public will form uninformed opinions, because they don't know what I know, this could be horrible. I do not understand the viewpoint. The public already has uninformed opinions about NFL players, coaches, etc. Big deal. Allow them to be more educated on the game, especially since the NFL would not exist without the public's interest.
This could be very exciting for amateur analysis of the game. That could potentially have some really cool effects on how we understand the game as data could be recorded and looked at closer, maybe an even greater data based era on the horizon for the NFL.
First, I'm so glad that there are so many NFL fans on HN. Now to the article; its going to be like getting your news from blogs. When you make something accessible to the masses, the quality gets diluted .. but I'm certain it makes things much more widely available. I'm willing to bet there are die-hard fans out there who are knowledgeable enough to put out quality analysis ala the analysis on NFL.com. If you listen to all the talking heads, you might not have a great experience. But over time, refine the opinions you consume, and I suspect we'll all come away for the better. I'm all for empowering the masses !
This is going to result in a lot of realtime "backseat coaching", especially with the rise of Twitter. Not so great for coaches doing a poor job, but great for the fans and those who want to learn more in-depth football strategy.
I think this is going to be fun because you will be able to concentrate on one player. Imagine if they had done this while, e.g., Lawrence Taylor, was still playing?
This is a real treat because we will get the see the attributed greatness* that previously only coaches, players and NFL Films could verify.
* The type of players for which coaches make adjustments, a week before the game, to account for.
I'll be the first to admit I'm no aficionado but I can't see how more information is a bad thing. The OP feels as if the unwashed masses, once having access to this font of knowledge, will no doubt arrive at the wrong conclusions. To which I say: ya, well, so what?
If anything this will be a boon for the NFL by only encouraging more engagement with their fan base.
The article basically says "A football match is now like a complicated, high-level chess match. It takes deep understanding to know what's going on, so only those parts of the match that most viewers can understand ought to be screened". This is not sound. By extension one could argue that complicated games should not be screened at all.
I have it. Never watched it more than 5 minutes. Unless you're a coach that film is boring. NFL is just entertainment to me, so the real game broadcast matters more than the actual tactics and little pieces of blocking details.
What's weird about professional sports is that the major franchises seem to think they're doing what they do for their own sake instead of entertaining their customers.
That's no weirder than lawyers thinking they're doing what they do to win a case rather than to achieve justice. The NFL entertains customers by being a serious, competitive league, just as criminal justice is supposed to work via an adversarial system. (Before anyone else points it out, let's just say the NFL works FAR better than the criminal justice system....)
tldr: "Oh my, the unwashed masses who pay our salaries get to see the full field and are too stupid to make intelligent commentary on it."
I am having a hard time trying to remember a sport that is more about the show than the actual sport as the NFL. MLB and NASCAR seem to get the whole package, but not the NFL.
Good point. All-22 tape, which is defined in the article, is footage of a football game that shows all 22 players on the field simultaneously. It is almost certainly not the footage you'll see if you watch a game on television, which follows the ball or, more rarely, individual players.
Maybe they should open up their games to be viewable online streaming LIVE and then their service might be worth paying for. It's 2012. Get with it NFL. There has been a world cup and a euro 2012 streamed live online successfully. FREE!
Rewind is nice if you missed something, but not so great because if you are watching a later game on rewind it'll spoil all earlier games.
